Implementing an ERP is a tall task, you may engage an integrate or tear down operations
Back in 1990, during my first job I had the chance to implement my firdst accounting software, it was named Contpaq (which nowadays it's still in the market as a management tool) and the enviroment: MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System, which must of the readers may naver heard about) with its black and green screen. In those good old days integrated systems were a luxury not all companies could afford, in our case as a small business we didn't even thought about that, nonetheless we needed to migrate from manual bookkeeping to a computarized system; well we didn't even had a computer network installed, but a single PC where we installed that accounting software, with a segmented chart of accounts where we kept all the subledgers and so on; on another PC we had an invoicing system, obviously that one was exclusively to print invoices; payroll? well as I mentioned on previous article, was manually put together.
Accounting was, at the time, the priority therefore the whole software was built to satisfy information systems related to financial statements, tax issues, and everything related exclusively to the accouting area, we were outsiders to the information systems required by sales, or service areas, we didn't even considered them when we selected and implemented the accountign software, it was unthinkable to us about their information needs, so we just thought about ours and we went on choosing the tool which will ease our job.
So time passed by and I left that job and started my own accounting firm and used the same kind of accounting software for the following few years, however I evolved a little as far as having a customer-server type of software, so we already were connected on a remote terminal to access the applications, modern times started to arrive.
But when I moved to my first major league multinational company I was introduced to a whole new concept: MRP (material resource planning); Platinum was the one I was exposed first, then AS400 those ones were intended to control the operation and had some sort of accounting interconection so now our information was feeded by the core business; and believe me, that really eased the paperwork, however we were not finished. I vividly remember for consolidation purposes we used hyperion, which all the loads were based on MS Excel templates where we mannualy entered the data so MIS area could consolidate the information for 20 LATAM countries and several different legal entities. Then Y2K arrived, and we all freaked out about what would happen, because not all software was Y2K compatible, at least not ours, then we started a whole new project: Oracle implementation, we just evolved from an MRP II to a real ERP (enterprise resources planning)
Orale had the whole thing integrated, with subledgers as cost accounting, AR, AP, Treasury, not built into the account structure but as an integrated module, and so many other features like project management, sales (not a CRM yet but a tool to manage pipeline), work orders, purchasing, etcetera, so now our job was really fed by the day to day operation, we even had a Management Infromation Systems module; and a data warehouse; sounds great right? well, it was, but it took quite a lot of hard work to get it done; because the biggest hurdle you have to face while implementing an ERP is the design.
During the next delivery I'll share my insight while implementing an ERP and what I've exerienced when the implementation was not right.
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